John Ternus will host an Apple event as CEO for the first time on September 9 (Wednesday). The event is expected to introduce the iPhone 18 Pro, the 18 Pro Max and Apple’s first foldable (the vanilla iPhone will probably have to wait until next year). Based on unconfirmed information, the new models that will be unveiled on Wednesday will go on pre-order two days later on Friday. And you should start preparing yourself now for the coming price hike.
The Apple iPhone Ultra, the tentative name of Apple’s first foldable, was spotted on Vodafone Egypt by Yousif Ayman. The phone was priced EGP 155,750 before the page was taken down. Note that different countries have different taxes, so a direct currency conversion is rarely accurate.
Apple iPhone Ultra price leaked by Vodafone Egypt
The iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at EGP 94,400, meaning that the Ultra costs 65% more. Considering that the 17 Pro Max launched at $1,200 / £1,200 / €1,450 / ₹150,000, we can apply the 65% increase and get a prediction of $1,980 / £1,980 / €2,395 / ₹247,500. You can compare that to the Galaxy Z Fold8 launch prices since the Ultra is expected to be a wide foldable – the Z Fold8 launched at $1,900 / £1,700 / €2,000 / ₹180,000. Things are surprisingly close in the US, but other regions may be in for a price shock.
As another point of comparison, X poster @ev_downunder reports that the 256GB iPhone Ultra will be AUD 3,700, while the 512GB and 1TB models will be AUD 4,200 and AUD 4,700, respectively. Again, we’ll use the 256GB iPhone 17 Pro Max for comparison – it costs AUD 2,200, which means that the Ultra is 68% more expensive. That’s essentially the same price ratio as we got from the calculation based on Vodafone Egypt – note prices are usually nice, round numbers, so the base Ultra will most likely get a $2,000 price tag.
Yousif Ayman’s post about the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra pricing (machine translated)
That same post by Yousif Ayman also reports that Vodafone Egypt had the iPhone 18 Pro at EGP 98,000 and the iPhone 18 Pro Max at EGP 105,000. We turn to the Vodafone site to find that a 256GB iPhone 17 Pro is EGP 88,800 and an iPhone 17 Pro Max is EGP 94,400. This translates to a 10% price hike for the Pro and 11% for the Pro Max. Let’s use 10% for both, again because of price rounding.
iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra (speculative renders)
Looking back, the iPhone 17 Pro launch prices were $1,100 / £1,100 / €1,300 / ₹135,000. Adding 10% to that gives us $1,210 / £1,210 / €1,430 / ₹148,500. That shouldn’t be too surprising – according to estimates by TrendForce, the Bill of Materials (BoM) for the iPhone 18 Pro is 40% higher than for the 17 Pro. The analysts estimated that the new Pro model (with 256GB storage) will cost $1,400, so a $1,200 price tag would actually be good news.
Let’s do the same calculation for the iPhone 17 Pro Max. Adding 10% to its launch price gives us $1,320 / £1,320 / €1,600 / ₹165,000. Again, this is just an estimate, we will find out the actual prices on Wednesday.